Well there were quite a few posts related to topic but anyway here is the most relevant post:
Who is Roberta Williams, and how did she wreck that ship? (And, come to think of it, what was that ship?)
Since this was unanswered, and since I don't really have much else to contribute to the thread, I'll take this one.
The graphical adventure game of the 80's and early 90's is a direct decendant of text-based adventure games like Zork and Collossal Caves; the main difference is that there are graphics on the screen. Originally, you still needed to use a command line to do stuff, aside from moving the character on the screen. The two big competitors of the era were Sierra Entertainment, founded by Ken and Roberta Williams, and Lucasfilm Games, later Lucasarts.
Lucasfilm Games made Maniac Mansion, Loom, The Monkey Island games, The Dig, Sam and Max, Grim Fandango, and Full Throttle. Pretty much every single one of the adventure games they made was awesome between 1986 and 2000, when they stopped making them altogether for reasons that will become apparent later in the narrative. They also made a bunch of cool games from other genres, but that's tangental to the plot here.
Sierra, on the other hand, made the King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry adventure games, as well as the Quest for Glory RPG/Adventure hybrid, and a few dozen other franchises. Roberta Williams was the game designer on the Kings Quest series, which was Sierra's longest-running and most popular series of adventure games.
To be unkind, the basic philosophy of Sierra's game design in this genre was to find ways to force the players to either purchase the guide book or call their help line (which was a 1-900 number with a price comparable to phone sex lines at the time.) The puzzles were often completely nonsensical, death was a constant threat (and would often come for no predictable reason), it was easy to put the game in a condition where the game was unwinable, and to top it all off almost all of them featured at least one puzzle that can only be completed by performing some command or chain of commands that no sane person would ever think of in a million years.
Contrariwise, Lucasarts kept the illogic to a minimum, death as a punishment happened very rarely (if at all), and you could never get the game into a unwinnable position. They stopped making adventure games when adventure games weren't selling well, because 'Adventure Game' had become synonymous with 'Sierra', which was synonymous with 'Twelve hours of hunt-the-pixel, die-a-thousand-times-trying-to-pet-a-dog, stealing-cat-hair-and-maple-syrup-to-make-a-fake-moustache-to-disguise-yourself-as-a-man-who-doesn't-have-
a-moustache puzzles.'
Necrokiller:
SolitarySoldier:
XPremiuM:
faraany3k:
iampasha:
Phil keeps talking about breaking barriers to gaming, making it accessible on all platforms yada...
